I know I promised a long time ago more about our homeschooling. If Spaces plays nice, maybe I'll put some more here from time to time. I've pretty much given up trying to use Livejournal as any sort of personal blog. I always liked Spaces' format better, but it's been very un-Mac-friendly for the last couple of years, but now mostly better.

Anyway, besides my main Twitter account aeroG, I've started several others - yeah, I really LOVE Twitter! One is for homeschooling links, info, resources: Homeschooling .

BTW, in case you're one of those folks who don't "get" homeschooling, let me just say this:

Homeschooling 101

LESSON ONE: Most people homeschool because education is VERY important to them, not less important!

There, I think I needed to get that off my chest :)

I wrote last year about searching for my old teachers and mentioned how the school I'd spent longer at than any other, Will Rogers Elementary, was about to be torn down.

Well, today the Houstonist is reporting that a Costco wholesale will be built on part of that tract. Actually, it'll be on the part where the HISD Administration Building (enviously known as "the Taj" - it was quite nice, though terribly space inefficient, inside) stood. That's it in the top photo of the Houstonist post (cute pun). The Administration Building's very open, multi-level interior bore absolutely no resemblance to its fort-like exterior.

The 24-acre HISD tract, sold for $38 million, was supposed to get some sort of "special" development, since it was billed as the biggest tract of land available for development inside Houston's Loop, but a retail/apartment? complex anchored by Costco seems to be a considerable step down, especially since it's right across Richmond Ave. from Greenway Plaza, one of the most elaborate office/multi-use developments in the country.

While I watched them build Greenway Plaza (after tearing down several friends' houses) throughout my childhood, the last parts of its master plan (not to mention the aircraft landing strip that was depicted, in their elaborate model, to be atop a building on the south side of US 59) fell victim to the downturn of the 1980s. Since these tracts eventually got converted to retail, cinema, a Mercedes dealership, etc., I guess it shouldn't be surprising that'll be the fate of the HISD tract as well.

At least the church I grew up in (and where Susan and I had our wedding reception), Central Presbyterian, is still there, across Cummins from the HISD tract. I got a surprise recently when I discovered that one of my AeroGo subscribers goes to another Presbyterian church that meets there, Pathways, though he says Central Pres. is still there as well.

Well, my oldest daughter's done with a couple of her classes. After school she told me about her psychology final, and I told her I couldn't help wondering if it was actually an experiment. She did say that she was confused about it, because at the beginning of the semester the prof said there'd be four tests, but then they'd already had four and all of a sudden there was going to be a final.

There was something odd about the test that she only started noticing after several pages of questions. It wasn't weird, but somewhat curious, so who knows. I'm by nature a rather suspicious person (though I must not look like it, since salespeople always think I'm an easy target), so perhaps it was nothing.

In any case, I've read about a lot of odd/humorous experiments that psychologists and their like have pulled on people over the years. Certainly, one of the funniest was simply the old show Candid Camera. It was really popular when I was little, because it was so funny to see all the different reactions people would have. I guess in a way it was one of the earliest attempts at "reality" (yeah, sure) TV.

You don't see much physics on TV, but there was one episode I remember where there was a large, heavy suitcase in a receptionist area, and a secretary would ask men to carry it down the hall for her, into one of the offices. It was so funny because they would, with difficulty, pick it up, and just about the time they started feeling proud of themselves for getting it down the hall, they would try to turn into the office and the suitcase would not budge. At all.

It would only go straight, because the Hollywood folks had gone down to one of the local aerospace companies, I believe it was, and gotten a sizable gyroscope. That thing was spinning inside the suitcase, and was not about to turn (unless you pushed down at one of the ends, I guess).

Experiment design is really something of an art, especially in psychology where it is so easy to inadvertantly influence the test subject. Nevertheless, some interesting experiments have been quite simple. There were several, some done at UT I believe, where a man would do various things in different forms of dress and they would measure what percentage of people copied him. Some examples were looking up at a high building and crossing the street when the light was red. They found out that if he wore a suit, several times as many people would follow his lead (this was several decades ago, maybe it would be different today, but who knows).

A lot of times, in order to get the real answer they're after, psychologists will run one test, to get everyone focussed on it, but then ask something else of the test subjects that is the real test. One of my favorites was a focus group for some kind of portable electronic device. The subjects were asked their opinions of various colors and whatnot, and in the end were told to take their choice of the device off the table at the rear, as their reward for attending.

Interestingly, I don't remember which colors they were, but while the subjects voiced a resounding preference for a certain more flashy color - I guess as supposedly the "right" answer - they actually took many more of the other color home with them!

Well, that's about it for now, but of course there are psych tests and then are pSyCh tEsTs ... If you want a pretty funny account (not suitable for younger ages) of the good cop/bad cop routine that astronaut candidates used to go through (and that they're probably polishing up again considering recent events), read chapter one of Mike Mullane's Riding Rockets. It's scary and hilarious.

Mullane writes, "The [first] doctor rose from behind a desk and introduced himself, shaking hands with a very weak, moist grip. I hadn't been in the room for fifteen seconds and already I was in a panic." Hmm ... yes, the joy of psychology. Well, I don't think I can help you with that, but if you're asked if you've ever had amnesia, apparently the right answer is, "I don't remember."

And I'd likely agree with Pete Conrad on one test; in fact, I suspect all blank sheets of paper are upside down. That explains why they're so hard to write on!

I decided to go ahead and put LightSide on my Technorati Profile, and it asked me to write a post including that link, which was good because I had a few little things I wanted to write about.

Our eight year old, for one, continues his curiosity about medical stuff. It seems ridiculous the number of drug ads you see on television these days, but whenever there's one where they show the digestive system or some other body organ (thank God they can't show how all these drugs work!), he's glued to the screen.

He's always reading the encyclopedia now, which is neat. I love seeing kids with an active curiosity and desire to learn about a subject that fascinates them. A few months ago, Susan and I went to Borders and bought him a physiology book. We spent about half an hour sorting through a couple dozen books trying to find something that, obviously, wasn't too hard, but at the same wasn't really a "kid's" book. We ended up getting him Barron's Essential Atlas of Physiology, which isn't really for the average 8 year old, but hey, I say, strike while the iron is hot.

By his age, I'd read about all the aerospace books in my elementary school and church library, and was pretty much starved for new material for years. Like the folks eating shoe leather or tulip bulbs in wartime, I ended up trying to read a math dictionary in the school library. Talk about BORING! I had to give up, some books are just not meant to be chewed or digested ...

Anyway, the physiology book was a small investment in our son which could pay off big if he ever does become a "brain and eye doctor", as he says. Even if he doesn't, I want him to be able to pursue whatever it is that God has put on his heart. He seems to be pretty interested in all the organs and even in the chemistry, so who knows how far he'll go if he has the chance.

Of course, I have to brace myself for a lot of "odd" questions. This morning, at breakfast no less, he just suddenly asks me, "Dad, when people die, why don't they take their brain out so everybody can look at it?" I wonder if that's how the Egyptians used to think ... ANYWAY, I think what he really meant was why don't they have more brains on exhibit, sprinkled around like moon rocks, I guess.

Actually, we did get to see some brains recently, at the Health Museum in Houston's Museum District, where there is a special Brain: Explore the World Inside Your Head exhibit going on through May 6th. It's fascinating (and scary) to see how small a great white shark's brain is. I wouldn't count on trying to psych that predator out.

Also, on the topic of animals, I've been waiting for a chance to mention some hilarious photos from a Tokyo zoo. Apparently the zoo higher-ups decided they needed a drill to practice dealing with an animal escape. So they had a zookeeper dress up in an orangutan suit for the "mock" escape. Their Japanese interpretation of monkey suit is a riot, kind of like manga meets monkey, or something.

Well, there was this slight problem. It seems no one bothered to tell the kids that it was just a drill! So they see this giant monkey running around loose - scary enough - who begins fighting zookeepers who then proceed to shoot it with a gun (a tranquilizer)! I guess it was a little much for the kids. It reminds me of when we went to EPCOT/DW when our oldest was just a baby. We were eating breakfast one morning in the hotel, and all of a sudden Chip n Dale walk in. Sitting down, they seemed huge. It was a bit much for her, at her age.

BTW, the captions Spiegel Online put with the photos are hilarious.

I don't get that much traffic yet on Light Side, but much of what I do get here comes from folks looking at the Education category, even though categories haven't been working most of this year, at least on my Mac browser. As I've noted, it hasn't been a good year for Spaces, and I still think the new MySpace-lookalike theme is ugly! But I digress - I already wrote about that!

Anyway, if you've landed here either directly or from categories and are interested in education, you may well have encountered a fairly common phenomenon, the budding space geek. I once heard a speech by one of the Teacher-in-Space finalists, who said that space was the most popular science interest every year except third grade, I believe she said, when kids were most fascinated with dinosaurs.

Since young space geeks are so common, and since aerospace is one of the most advanced high-tech fields and the top manufacturing export industry in the U.S., and since an interest in space is one of the top motivators for students pursuing science and math education, we might well want to do a lot more to cultivate the interest so many kids have in space and astronomy.

Of course, this is much of the idea behind my site AeroGo, which is aimed more at high school and college students (and other adults). Nevertheless, when kids are young even a small thing like a book can have a big impact. With this in mind, I just spent some time checking into a fairly new crop of the best illustrated astronomy and space books, which I reviewed on AeroGo. My picks are also shown in the list at left.

If you have a child or a young niece or nephew or someone else showing an interest in space, you can help them develop that interest with one of the "very best" books at left. You'll help support Light Side and AeroGo, too, if you order them through the special Amazon links found at left and on the AeroGo site.

As I've noted before, in education you never know what some seemingly small investment into a child might end up producing, so I encourage you to buy one of these top picks for the space geek in your life - of whatever age!

One of the goals I set for this year was to make an effort, via the net, to try looking for many of my old teachers and to contact a few of them. When March rolled around I realized I'd better get started, and so for the last three months or so I've been trying to do that, unfortunately with little success.

I did manage to find one of the first folks I looked for, a Sunday school teacher who had worked for NASA and then moved away. Though he's now partly retired, he still has a NASA email address, and I managed to contact him that way, and we corresponded a little.

Even his case was fairly difficult, but he had a relatively uncommon first name and I was pretty sure who he worked for. It's been much tougher with most of my other teachers, and so far I really haven't had much success at all.

Today I tried looking for several people, including my Kindergarten teacher. Susan was amazed I could remember her name (I think I've got it right but I'm not sure after 37 years). Susan's memory of her first years in elementary school here is a blur, I guess, since she was having to learn English. Even then, when some years ago we drove by her old school, over in Magnolia Park on the other side of Houston, she still had fond memories of it.

Memories are about all that's left of my elementary school, which closed last month, after 56 years. I've only driven by it a few times in recent years, but still it feels weird to think that the place, where I spent a great deal of seven of my earliest years, will be gone.

As it turns out, there are at least several kindergarten teachers with the name I was looking for in the U.S. And that's just kindergarten teachers! After so many years, you kind of assume that you can find folks on the net, but this is still pretty difficult. I signed up with classmates.com recently, which is pretty good and seems to be growing a lot, but so far very few teachers have joined classmates.com. Maybe someone with a teacher's group could start a push to get more teachers to sign up.

I guess my experience shows there's still a lot of opportunity for reconnecting folks with websites, such as military buddies, foreign exchange students, etc. I did read an interesting article recently about some Jewish people who, six decades after being sent to concentration camps, have been reconnected by the internet. Of course the sad part was there were only a few who did in fact survive, which of course would have made it hard even to know who to look for, but it must be amazing to see someone again after so many years and such a difficult ordeal.

I don't know why I find reconnecting with the past interesting; maybe it's because I've experienced so little of it since leaving for college. The Houston economy was in terrible shape when Susan and I graduated in 1986 (oil had plunged to below $10) and as far as I can tell most folks didn't come back like we did. I got a job here because NASA had given out a new contract just shortly before the Challenger accident, but that disaster meant that the rest of the space business was also pretty depressed that year.

In any case, I still remember a lot of my teachers and appreciate the efforts they made. As a parent I can understand a lot better now how a teacher must make countless unnoticed little efforts or sacrifices on behalf of their students. Teaching as a profession was difficult back then, but in somewhat different ways; there wasn't as many curriculum constraints and emphasis on test scores as today, but on the other hand teacher pay really wasn't keeping up with inflation during the 1970s, to the point where it was pretty bad by the time I graduated.

I guess I'll keep trying from time to time to see if I can find more folks from the past. I wonder if one of these days most everyone will have a blog or some kind of home page where they can be located. It seems like about 2/3 of people use the net and 1/3 could care less, and maybe of those 2/3 of net users only a modest fraction are interested in blogs or other content creation. Of course, the percentages are much higher with younger folks, so maybe it's actually easier to travel forward in time on the net than backward!

When I was in school there was a joke about bleary-eyed students finally having had enough and falling asleep on their textbooks. It was called learning by osmosis. Back then there was actually some company that advertised you could learn in your sleep by listening to their tapes, some kind of subliminal thing.

I doubt that would work any better (nor be any more restful than sleeping on a fat textbook), but it might give you some pretty wild dreams. I sure wouldn't want to "learn" about the Battle of Gettysburg or "read" the Diary of Anne Frank that way!

Nevertheless, after watching my kids for nearly two decades now, I think there is in fact a sort of indirect learning process going on. This is the amazing way kids can pick up things just by listening, whether to their older siblings and parents (usually good) or even the TV (not so good).

Yesterday my five-year-old daughter, who has already shown some interest in aerospace and tech "personalities", asked me all of a sudden, "Daddy, is Bill Gates real?" I guess most parents get asked around this age about Santa Claus, but I had been talking to some of the others (yes, the indoctrination is nearly constant around here) about how another tech entrepreneur, actually Bill Gross, had sold candy to the kids in his apartment complex, making money even at a young age.

I'm trying to get across to my kids how there's a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurship nowadays, even at their age. Of course, some of them are more suited to this than others, but a lot of homeschool kids seem to have started businesses, some with considerable success. In a way they have the ideal conditions, i.e. a stable and active family, a learning- and growth-oriented environment, much more free time than a public-school student, a computer/net-intensive home environment, lots of social contacts who would often be glad to help, and very low living expenses.

A lot of the problem is that they don't see it at their age. The hardest part of entrepreneurship is paying the bills (and getting insurance) while starting up, and these are non-issues for teens. I guess I should just say that it really bothers me how kids aren't encouraged more to accomplish stuff in their teen years. Once they get past the teen doldrums, they have so much energy that it's a shame to see it go to waste or be used destructively.

There are some kids who obviously take longer to mature, but there are also many others who are naturally more mature, and as with the smart kids in school (these groups overlap, but only partially), they get grouped with the lowest common denominator and are just expected to act crazy or do nothing through much of what is perhaps the best years of their lives.

I first heard about Bill Gross when I visited Caltech in 1981. He was already well-known there, having started a high-quality speaker business and stereo store, GNP, that sold to a lot of students. I never met him, but did buy a stereo from his brother. Around the same time (1983) Susan started telling me about this guy at UT who was selling computer stuff from his dorm. I remember staying with her brother at Jester dorm and seeing something about the disks or whatever it was he was selling. By then he may have already dropped out of school.

I left Caltech for Austin (and Susan) in early 1984, and Michael Dell was already getting steady press about his growing business. At that time it was called PC's Limited. Though I used a Mac, I decided to go check it out. It was a modest-sized store with a glass case in the middle, lots of motherboards, modem cards, etc., around, but not a single complete PC on display (except maybe the register). When Dell talks about lean inventory, they're serious, and always have been! Now Michael Dell is the wealthiest guy in Texas (or at least was before the oil price went up).

I often wonder what prompts someone like Dell or Gross to start a small business at an early age, whether it's selling candy or else stamps and newspaper subscriptions, as Dell did. Surely many other kids enjoyed the same opportunity. Robert Kiyosaki has discussed this in his Rich Dad books, how you have to be able to think and see the opportunity.

In any case, I want to do what I can to encourage my kids to think like entrepreneurs and leaders, even at an early age. This really involves a part of education that is often neglected, that of exposure. As with my daughter simply listening to older folks talk, a lot of times we don't start learning (or inquiring about) stuff until it first registers in our minds. An example would be an unusual name or word. I've noticed many times what happens when I meet someone with an unusual name, that as far as I know, I've never heard before.

What's really going on is that when I meet them, the name finally registers in my mind, so that I first really become aware of it. I know this must be the case, because whether it's a name or a new word, I'm amazed how frequently I tend to hear it once I first actually "notice" it. It wasn't as if all of a sudden a bunch of people suddenly took that name; I was hearing/reading it before but just not paying any attention.

Regarding the exposure portion of education, there's a great movie from the 1980s, Stand and Deliver, about math teacher Jaime Escalante's success working with poor students in Los Angeles. He exposed them to opportunities in a world of science and engineering that was totally unfamiliar to them, even though they lived in the capital of the world for aerospace engineering.

I'm trying to do something similar with my site AeroGo, for potential aviation, aerospace and other engineering students. I get hits from all over the world, and while many are from tech labs and colleges, there are also quite a few from places far from the tech mainstream. If I manage to find the next Wehrner von Braun or Sergei Korolev growing up in some third-world country (and get him working for the good guys), then I'll have accomplished at least one of the goals that would make the effort worthwhile.

I guess what I'm saying is that this exposure part of education is a high-leverage activity, and we need to get a lot more aggressive about it. Kids should take a lot more field trips to labs, plants, factories, colleges, and so on, and they need to hear their parents and others talking about productive work, politics, theology, and other things they might otherwise be totally clueless about.

I suspect this is one of the biggest advantages of having a big family, at least in an environment where education is emphasized. The oldest kids get to hear their parents talk a lot, and the younger ones get the stimulus from the older siblings, whether it's just listening to them, having them read to them, or seeing their example. The reality is, kids' brains can soak up an awful lot, good or bad, if given the chance, so we need to make sure they get that chance, and that it's something good. You never know where one little idea, even just selling candy or stamps, will lead.

With regard to curriculum, we have been fortunate to find some really good stuff that is also pretty time-efficient. A fourth general point (see the first three in the previous post) for those unfamiliar with homeschooling: there is a HUGE selection of curricula available nowadays, at least in English.

When we first started I would try to make a list of all the choices and go check them out at a homeschool convention (there are lots of these), but making a list of all would likely be impossible now. This means that if you haven't found something that suits you, you should certainly keep on looking, especially since better and better stuff seems to be coming out. Getting the right (not just a good) curriculum for you can make a huge difference.

We start our children at age 4 with just phonics. I'd like to write some more about our experience teaching our children to read, but I'll leave that for a later post. Let me simply say that we have used Samuel Blumenfeld's Alpha-Phonics for 13 years and have found it to be highly effective. Alpha-Phonics is very user-friendly (simple and time-efficient) and has worked well both with highly Auditory, easy-to-teach students and with difficult-to-teach students.

At 5, Susan starts arithmetic and formal handwriting (of course the child has to write the letters with Alpha-Phonics, too). For math through 5th grade, we interleave A Beka's Arithmetic series with Essential Learning Products' Math Practice Simplified books. We start with ELP's Counting, Measuring, & Telling Time book, which is now out of print (ELP has changed their books somewhat). Apparently the comparable book now would be Primary Concepts. Then comes Arithmetic 1, followed by the ELP Addition book, Arithmetic 2, ELP Subtraction, etc. A Beka has a good review structure, and combining its accelerated approach with extra rote practice from ELP has worked well for us.

It took us a long, long time to find a handwriting curriculum that Susan was happy with. Finally a lady from our church gave us a box of random curricula from who-knows-where. Amazingly (to me, who had tried many times to find her something), there was a handwriting practice book in there that she actually liked! I still don't understand what the difference is (there are several approaches, but they seem pretty much the same to me), but Susan's finally happy. Your results may vary, but the one she likes is Evan-Moor's Traditional Manuscript and Traditional Cursive.

It also took quite a few years for Susan to settle on a spelling curriculum. We use Modern Curriculum Press' Spelling Workout series. Spelling is a strange subject to teach, because students' natural aptitudes vary widely. MCP seems to be working well enough (most of our children have done well), and Susan likes it, but I can't help wondering if it's pretty much impossible to teach some kids impeccable spelling! Maybe I can write more about this later.

For grammar, we use A Beka's Language series. Maybe I should mention that A Beka is one of the biggest Christian curriculum publishers. Originally, a lot of the curriculum publishers wouldn't sell to homeschoolers, but now it is the biggest market for many. Many of A Beka's books are "worktexts", which are consumable workbooks costing about $10-15. Of course, teacher's editions can be a lot more. Susan doesn't use these for the early years (sometimes she uses an old worktext as an answer key), but they become increasingly necessary in later years. Also, be aware that a lot of times publishers change editions every few years, which significantly increases costs if a second teacher edition or key is needed. We have ordered ahead in some cases, to avoid having to switch editions.

Newcomers may not realize it, but history is the subject that really launched the homeschool movement. In the 1950s and '60s, a few perceptive Christians became increasingly alarmed at the de-emphasis of Christian beliefs in American history (almost all the major universities, for example, were started by Christians and many had Christian charters so explicit they would shock folks today), and the de-emphasis of the history subject in general. In my own experience, I was just young enough to miss "new math" and fortunate to have teachers that taught phonics, so the first point at which I started to question my public school education was about 5th grade, when I started wondering, "when are we going to get to history?"

So with that buildup, I can assure you that history is important to us, but our approach is not much like most homeschoolers. In the later years, I am still trying to put together a somewhat ambitious custom curriculum. Throughout history, we incorporate a substantial writing component. The children have to write a lot of short essays on history topics they've studied. For this reason, we usually wait until the child's language skills are strong enough to handle simple writing (this age varies a lot, and writing is a real struggle for a lot of them at first). We then begin with the Facts on File Illustrated History of the World (8 vols.), which takes several years to do, but gives a good overview/timeline view of history.

Maybe I can write more about why we start with world history another time, and about our overall strategy of teaching (basically, it's to teach them a love of reading and learning in general, with strong writing skills). Also, I'm sure I've left something out (P.E., obviously; Health, Science, ...), but this post is long enough already!

In case anyone's interested, I thought I'd give an overview of the routine and curriculum we use for homeschooling. For those unfamiliar with how it's done, I'll just start with a few general comments.

First, there are many different successful homeschooling methods, which you can read about elsewhere on the web. Second, no one (as far as I know) tries to imitate a regular public-school day of seven or eight hours. Nowhere near this much time is needed for most methods, though a few of the more ambitious ones, such as unit studies, might come close (the implication here is that the more time is spent homeschooling, the LESS it will generally resemble public school). Third (in my opinion a major advantage), there's no reason why you have to follow the public school calendar either (unless some of the children are in public school), though most homeschoolers don't seem to so far be taking full advantage of this.

One reason calendar flexibility can mean such an advantage is it can eliminate the need for extensive post-summer review. I'm amazed at how many people, homeschoolers and others, remain attached to the traditional summer break. Everyone needs a break, but such a long one means that much material must be reviewed every fall before new stuff is really learned. When I was in school, it seemed we wasted at least several weeks every fall, and maybe more, this way. That's maybe 10% of a 36-week school year.

So, as you might suspect, we don't have a long summer break. Instead, we homeschool year-round, 4 days a week. Four days per week likewise has a lot of advantages, especially when you have to juggle many activities, since you have both Friday and Saturday available as makeup days (we try not to do school on Sundays). The math also works in your favor when you take a week's break, since you're only losing 4 days, not five. This means that after allowing for a week of holidays, you can still take six weeks off during the year and get in 180 days of schooling (4 days x 45 weeks = 5 days x 36 weeks). I'm sure this won't appeal to everyone, but if you are good at being consistent you might want to try it.

Some families try to accelerate their children's education by homeschooling, but in our case with a lot of other things going on and a large family, we didn't really view such a goal as feasible. Nevertheless, while things often moved slower with the oldest children as we experimented with curricula, etc., it's beginning to look like our younger children are moving a little faster and may finish somewhat early, at least in some subjects. This is because Susan is very consistent in maintaining a set pace in school, even though our schedule tends to vary a lot from week to week. Most curricula take a little less than 180 days, I guess, to actually complete.

With nine children to teach, you would think Susan would try to teach them together, but she has never taken such an approach. Instead, she teaches each one at a time, some days more extensively, others mostly just going over homework assignments. Of course, the older ones can take longer, but here is where curriculum choice can really make a difference. With the right curriculum, a reasonably diligent student can do most of the work on their own, so that the teacher's job (in the later years) increasingly becomes one of oversight. While some might not like this approach, I view it as an advantage, because one of our goals all along has been to teach the children how to teach themselves. Nevertheless, we don't take it as far as some folks do, where their children pretty nearly completely work on their own.

Since this post is getting so long, I'll cover the curriculum we use in a separate post.

Lisa left a comment about homeschooling under my last entry after I visited her family's blog. They have a difficult situation that very likely does prevent them from homeschooling. While we also have a large family, we have been blessed with the opportunity to homeschool, which of course has been a challenge, though well worth it.

I know there's lots of folks that can't homeschool for various reasons, though I also have learned (third-hand) of some cases where mothers managed to do it where it seemed impossible. In any case, the important thing for every parent to remember is, even if you can't handle the whole job, there's still the rest of the time you have with your children.

Education is something that really should be going on all the time, not just in a classroom setting at certain hours. If we show curiosity about things and a love for learning ourselves, it is likely our children will learn this as well. Then they can teach themselves if they have to, and they will never stop learning their whole life through.

You never know what little seed of encouragement, wisdom, or direction, planted in a child's mind or heart, will end up producing a profound impact on their life. Teaching is a great opportunity.